The Israel-Argentina Yellowcake Connection
Previously Secret Documents Show That Canadian Intelligence Discovered
That Israel Purchased Yellowcake from Argentines during 1963-1964
Information Later Shared with British and Americans, Who Accepted It after
Hesitation
U.S. State Department Insisted that Uranium Sales Required Safeguards to
Assure Peaceful Use but Israel Was Uncooperative and Evasive About the
Yellowcake's Ultimate Use
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 432
Posted -- June 25, 2013
For more information contact:
William Burr -- 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Avner Cohen -- 831/647-6437 or 202/489-6282 (cell); avnerc@miis.edu
Washington, D.C., June 25, 2013 -- During 1963-64, the Israeli government
secretly acquired 80-100 tons of Argentine uranium oxide ("yellowcake")
for its nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. and British archival
documents published today for the first time jointly by the National
Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project,
and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The U.S.
government learned about the sale through Canadian intelligence and found
out even more from its Embassy in Argentina. Washington was concerned that
the yellowcake purchase cast doubts on Israel's claims about a peaceful
nuclear program. In response to U.S. diplomatic queries about the sale,
the government of Israel was evasive in its replies and gave no answers to
the U.S.'s questions about the transaction.
The U.S. government learned about the facts of the sale through Canadian
intelligence and found out even more from its Embassy in Argentina. The
government of Israel avoided giving answers to any questions about the
yellowcake purchase.
These nearly unknown documents shed light on one of the most obscure
aspects of Israel's nuclear history--how secretly and vigorously Israel
sought raw materials for its nuclear program and how persistently it tried
to cultivate relations with certain nuclear suppliers. Yellowcake, a
processed uranium ore, was critically important to Israel for fuelling its
nuclear reactor at Dimona and thereby producing plutonium for weapons. The
story of the Argentine yellowcake sale to Israel has remained largely
unknown in part because Israel has gone to great lengths to keep tight
secrecy to this day about how and where it acquired raw materials for its
nuclear program. Moreover, the U.S. government and its close allies kept
secret for years what they knew at the time.
That Argentina made the yellowcake sale to Israel has been disclosed in
declassified U.S. intelligence estimates, but how and when Washington
learned about the sale and how it reacted to it can now be learned from
largely untapped archival sources. Among the disclosures in today's
publication:
* French restrictions on Israel's supply of uranium in 1963 made U.S. and
British officials suspect that Israel would attempt to acquire yellowcake
from other sources without any tangible restrictions to sustain its
nuclear weapons program.
* A Canadian intelligence report from March 1964 asserted Israel had all
of the "prerequisites for commencing a modest nuclear weapons development
project."
* When the Canadians discovered the Argentine-Israeli deal they were
initially reluctant to share the intelligence with Washington because the
United States had refused to provide them with information on a recent
U.S. inspection visit by U.S. scientists to Dimona.
* U.S. and British intelligence were skeptical of the Canadian finding
until the U.S. Embassy sources in Argentina confirmed the sale to Israel.
* The Israelis would not answer questions about the transaction. When U.S.
scientists visited the Dimona facility in March 1965 to check whether the
Israelis were meeting peaceful uses commitments, they asked about the
yellowcake but their Israeli hosts said that question was for "higher
officials."
* In 1964 U.S. officials tried to persuade the Argentines to apply strong
safeguards to future uranium exports but had little traction for securing
agreement.
* In 1965, while the CIA and the State Department were investigating the
Argentine yellowcake sale, Washington pursued rumors that the French
uranium mining company in Gabon had sought permission to sell yellowcake
to Israel.
Since late 1960 when the CIA learned that the Israelis had been
constructing, with French assistance, a nuclear reactor near Dimona in the
Negev Desert, the United States and close allies (and the Soviet Union as
well) worried that Israel had a nuclear weapons program under way. The
Canadian government was also concerned; sometime in the spring of 1964 its
intelligence agency learned about the yellowcake sale and shared the
information with the British.
Convinced that the Canadian information confirmed Israel's interest in
nuclear weapons, a British diplomat calculated that the yellowcake would
enable the Israelis to use their Dimona nuclear reactor to produce enough
plutonium for its first nuclear weapon within 20 months. In light of these
concerns, the British shared the information with the U.S. government;
both governments, as well as Canada, were concerned about stability in the
Middle East, which the Israeli nuclear program could threaten. Both
Washington and London wanted yellowcake sales safeguarded to curb the
spread of nuclear weapons capabilities to other countries.
As the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada always had done in the
past with intelligence information about the Israeli nuclear program, they
kept the entire yellowcake sale secret. On this matter there were no
leaks; the issue never reached the U.S. media then or later.
The documents in today's publication are from the U.S. and the British
National Archives. All of the U.S. documents were declassified in the
mid-1990s but have lingered in a relatively obscure folder in the State
Department's central foreign policy files at the U.S. National Archives.
They may never have been displayed in public before as the file appeared
to be previously untouched. A few of the British documents have been
cited by other historians, including ourselves, but the fascinating story
of British-Canadian-United States intelligence cooperation and
coordination has also been buried in relative obscurity. The
juxtaposition of U.S. and British records makes a fuller account possible,
although some elements of the story remain secret, such as the identity of
the Canadian intelligence source on the yellowcake purchase. Only Israeli
and Argentine documents, however, can provide the full story of the
yellowcake sale.
Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive website -
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb432/
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Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/
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